THE RABBIT'S LAST HURRAH

Before we got our cat, we had a real Christmas tree. When I was little, we always drove the Rabbit to pick out tree. The car was old and orange and my dad didn't care if the tree scratched any of the paint on the roof. After we picked out the fullest, best smelling tree, it got tied to the roof, and we drove on home. The car had a manual transmition so my dad needed both hands for driving. It fell to my mom to prevent the tree from flying off the car. She would put an old leather work glove on her left hand, stick her arm out of the sun roof and hold onto to the tree trunk for dear life. This was almost as ridiculous as the ordeal of getting the tree inside the house. Dad would attach the stand in the garage and cut it free from its plastic net. Then he would bear-hug the tree and carry it through the house, performing a loping waltz from room to room as mom ran before him moving end tables and breakable things out of the way.

I was really sad when we had to get rid of the Rabbit.  I had always imagined that it would be the car that I would learn to drive with. I might have even asked my dad if we could just leave it in the backyard and grow grass on it. That wasn't happening either. Its passing didn't go unnoticed. Dad compromised, and in its final winter we rimmed all of the Rabbit's windows with battery powered Christmas lights.